Israel’s Fascist Right is on the march

The Mainstreaming of Israel's Alt-Right

This is an interesting article by Newsweek of all publications.  To listen to the nonsense coming out of racist Labour politicians like Emily Thornberry, Joan Ryan et al, you would think that Israel was the embodiment of western democratic values in the Middle East.  The 'villa in the jungle' to borrow the racist phrase of the last Labour Prime Minister, Ehud Barak.

Yair Lapid is leader of Yesh Atid, a centrist party tipped to be the second largest party in the next Knesset

The reality is that Israel is the most right-wing, racist society on the planet.  It is a society where hatred of Arabs, Africans and non-Jews is visceral.  What is worse is that this hatred is encouraged by a far-Right government which includes a 'Justice Minister' Ayelet Shaked who has advocated genocide.  

This is the consequence of Israel being an ethno-nationalist society, a society based on only part of its population.  A society obsessed with racial purity, because being Jewish in Israel is a national/racial not a religious category.  In Israel race is defined on the basis of religion, something which often confuses people.  To make matters worse the Israeli Jewish population is itself divided between those who define themselves as Israeli first or Jewish first with a majority saying Jewish first.  Not that this matters to Israel's Palestinians because they are excluded from the tent and confined to the margins.

Although the article is well worth reading on the growing influence of Israel’s neo-Nazi far Right although it doesn’t deal with the reason why Israel’s alt-Right is growing so fast.  When Lehava calls for preventing Arab-Jewish relationships they are going with the grain of society.  There is broad consensus in the whole of society that Jewish-Arab relationships are a danger to society, because a Jewish state cannot tolerate large numbers of mixed couples.  That is the nature of the racism of Israeli society.  Mixed relationships, mishlinge, were also a problem for the Nazi state and this one topic consumed most of the time at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 which was devoted to planning the Final Solution.

Lapid is a Zionist consensus, from 'left' to 'right'.  So Yair  Lapid, of the secular centrist Yesh Atid declared that “It bothers me, I admit. I say that if tomorrow my son came to me and said, ‘Dad, I want you to meet Rona, not Rina, and she’s Russian Orthodox or Catholic and we’re getting married and the kids won’t be Jewish’ — would that bother me? It would bother me greatly.'

Israel is a Jewish state, or more accurately a State of the Jews and the Jews are defined as a Jewish Nation.  What that means is that Israel consideres itself a state, not just of its own Jewish citizens but all Jews, wherever they live.  One of the central tasks of Zionism is the 'ingathering of the exiles'

What Israel is not is a state of all of its citizens.  That is why it’s an apartheid state.  Non-Jewish citizens do not have equal right with Jewish citizens.  That is why there is no Israeli nationality but a central Jewish nationality and over 130 other nationalities.

Because a Jewish state means a permanent Jewish majority, the idea of  mixed marriages and a dilution of the primary race is seen as a threat to the state itself.  That is why Lehava thugs patrol areas of Jerusalem unmolested by the Police attacking Arab males who are seen as likely to establish social or personal relations with Jewish women.

The suggestion that Israel can do nothing about Lehava, as the article states, is for the birds.  The article quotes Israeli authorities as saying that ‘there is little they can do to stop Gopstein—that he is protected by free speech.’  Utter nonsense. Israel's Palestinians are closely monitored on social media and any threats they make result in instant arrest.  Of course Jewish abuse is not punished.

For example Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian Israeli poet, was imprisoned and is now under house arrest, because she mentioned ‘resistance’ in an online poem.  The reason Gopstein has not been prosecuted and gaoled is because he is Jewish.  Even when he threatened to burn down churches and mosques he was not arrested. See for example VATICAN CALLS ON A-G TO INDICT EXTREMIST JEWISH LEADER FOLLOWING ENDORSEMENT OF BURNING CHURCHES

Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Muslim League, was convicted of racial hatred and gaoled for 9 months because it was held he made a comparison between Israel’s behaviour and the Jewish blood libel, a comparison which incidentally he disputed.

Nonetheless, despite its weaknesses this article should be read by people as it outlines very well where Israel is now heading.

I also attach an older article beneath it from the Jerusalem Post, when Tzipi Hotovely, who is now acting Foreign Minister of Israel, invited Benzi Gopstein into the Knesset to address a Committee on the 'problem' of combating inter-marriage.  Racism in Israel starts from the top down.

Tony Greenstein

 

Israel’s Alt-Right Is Now Mainstream—Are Lawmakers Doing Enough to Stop It?

By Yardena Schwartz On 3/7/18 at 9:50 AM

American-born rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, in Jerusalem, where he was known for his extreme views, such as expulsion of all Palestinians on the West Bank. He was assassinated in New York City. David H. Wells/Corbis via Getty

Updated | On November 5, 1990, at a Marriott Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side, Rabbi Meir Kahane had just taken his seat at a Zionist conference when El Sayyid Nosair, a 34-year-old Egyptian-American, shot him in the neck. Hours later, the Brooklyn-born rabbi—known as the most racist politician in Israeli history—was pronounced dead.

Most Israelis didn’t mourn. Two years before, the Israeli government had banned his political party, Kach, for its anti-Arab platform. Kahane had called for the forced expulsion of the millions of Arabs living in Israel, whom he often referred to as “dogs.” As the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi puts it, “Kahane turned his political agenda into a kind of Jewish jihad with an explicitly religious, apocalyptic message.”

Yet 27 years after Kahane’s murder, on another November evening, hundreds of Israelis gathered in West Jerusalem to commemorate the anniversary of his death. It was one of 25 such events held throughout Israel that week. At the podium, Jewish extremists took turns praising the rabbi, calling him a righteous prophet whose politics were ahead of his time.

Among those in attendance: Kahane’s prodigy and successor, Ben Zion “Bentzi” Gopstein. In 2005, he established Lehava, a nonprofit whose Hebrew name translates to “preventing assimilation in the Holy Land.” Gopstein’s group sends patrols of young men to “defend” Jewish women from Arabs. It also runs a hotline for people to report Jews having interfaith relationships, or renting or selling apartments to Israeli Arabs. Lehava has grown into the largest radical right-wing organization in Israel, with chapters in every city and more than 10,000 registered members—most of them young adults and teenagers. The group spreads its message and recruits members in schools, city streets and community centers.

Though Gopstein operates under the guise of fighting assimilation—a cause familiar to many American Jews—his critics argue that mission is just a front. Lehava, they say, is as dangerous as Kach. And like Kahane before him, Gopstein is rallying people around the goal of expelling Palestinians from Israel and the West Bank.

Benzi Gopstein, Israeli leader of the extreme right-wing movement Lehava, poses on August 11, 2015, in Jerusalem. Israel police had questioned him after he condoned torching churches amid an uproar over hate crimes, including the deadly firebombing of a Palestinian home. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty

But unlike Kahane’s views, which stood on the margins of Israeli society, Gopstein’s perspective has become mainstream—a shift, analysts say, that reflects Israelis’ dwindling faith in the prospect of peace with the Palestinians.

Critics argue that Israeli lawmakers have also enabled Lehava, even as they’ve demonized left-leaning human rights groups. Yet Israeli authorities say there is little they can do to stop Gopstein—that he is protected by free speech, and because his group is a nongovernmental organization, it has avoided the legal restrictions placed on Kahane’s political party. “Lehava is doing this very smartly,” says Tehilla Shwartz-Altshuler, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank.

But the group’s critics aren’t giving up. Last fall, the state attorney’s office announced its intention to indict Gopstein on charges of incitement to violence, racism and terrorism, along with obstruction of justice, pending a prehearing. (The charges all relate to statements he’s made in recent years. Among them: that Palestinian men who flirt with Jewish women deserve to be beaten.) Gopstein is still awaiting his prehearing. In the meantime, to the dismay of his distractors, he is a free man, with a large and growing following.

"The Israeli army, the Shin Bet and Mossad, they know how to deal with Muslim terror,” says Gadi Gvaryahu, the chairman of Tag Meir, one of the organizations battling Lehava. “Yet the state of Israel doesn’t know how to deal with right-wing extremists. People like Bentzi Gopstein are more dangerous to Israel than Muslim terror.”

 ‘You Can’t Coexist With Cancer’

Several months ago, I met Gopstein in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel, and he appeared giddy. A Jewish teenager had just left her Arab lover. Gopstein had been calling her for months, urging her to do so. Now, she finally had—because she was pregnant with his child. Gopstein says this was important because now the baby would be raised Jewish instead of Muslim.

Since founding Lehava, he says, he has “rescued” at least 1,000 girls like her. And in Jerusalem, Lehava activists are known for harassing—and sometimes beating—Palestinian men. Gopstein’s work has sometimes gotten him into trouble. Weeks earlier, police detained him, along with 14 members of Lehava, for threatening Arabs who were dating Jewish women. “Every time they arrest me, more people join my cause,” he says, smiling. In 2016, he was questioned by police after calling Christians bloodsucking vampires who should be expelled from the country. In 2014, he was detained after Lehava members set fire to a joint Jewish and Arab school in Jerusalem. The group also sprayed graffiti on the school’s walls. "You can't coexist with cancer,” it read.

In each of those cases, Gopstein was released the same day. He has never been indicted either. The last time Israeli authorities put him behind bars was in 1994, when the government banned Kahane’s political party. (The ban was in response to a massacre committed by another Kahane prodigy, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, killing 29 Muslim worshippers and wounding 125 others.)

The Justice Ministry refused to comment on Gopstein’s case while the investigation is underway. “He’s always been found not guilty because they have nothing,” says Gopstein’s attorney, Itamar Ben Gvir. “They don’t even have one example of Bentzi telling people to commit an attack. Praising Baruch Goldstein [which Gopstein has done] isn’t illegal. You can think it’s an awful thing to say. You can think it’s a wonderful thing to say. That’s a democracy.”

Yet Gopstein’s actions, critics say, speak to his real agenda: anti-Palestinian hatred. “Gopstein wants us to believe that he’s just worried about the future of the Jewish religion, but he’s not,” says Gvaryahu. “We never heard him fight against assimilation in the United States, and here the intermarriage rate is really insignificant.” Indeed, just 2 percent of Jewish Israelis have a non-Jewish spouse, compared with 44 percent in the U.S.

The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, has a unit for Jewish terrorism, but a spokesman tells me it’s the police’s responsibility to deal with Lehava. Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld says the local cops have been trying to prevent and respond to violence committed by Gopstein’s activists, but there is only so much they can do. “Police operations take place all year round in connection with Lehava,” Rosenfeld says, speaking in October, shortly after Gopstein’s latest detention. “Those suspects were released after significant evidence was presented against them. The police recommendation was to continue holding them. But at the end of the day, the decision made by the court, unfortunately, is what it is.”

Gopstein’s critics argue that Israel should treat him the same way it treats his Palestinian counterparts. But Israel has a long history of handling Jewish radicals differently. In 1984, the authorities determined that a Jewish militant group was plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest shrines. A court convicted 25 Jewish settlers of waging an underground campaign of violence against Arabs in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. All were soon released, except for three who were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison—but they wound up serving less than seven years. Jewish settlers cheered their return home. And they weren’t the only ones. Many of the Jewish extremists arrested in the 1980s and 1990s quickly re-entered Israeli society, becoming settlement leaders and political activists.

Israeli supporters of Lehava chant slogans outside the wedding hall where an Arab-Israeli man and a Jewish woman got married on August 17, 2014, in the Israeli coastal city of Rishon Letzion. GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty

More recently, in 2005, a Jewish extremist went to prison for stabbing marchers at Jerusalem’s gay pride parade. In 2015, three weeks after his release, he stabbed a 16-year-old Israeli girl to death at the same event. Gopstein and Lehava activists protested against that parade, calling it an “abomination,” and have continued to protest it every year since. “Israel should put much more into fighting Bentzi,” argues Gvaryahu. “It’s about time.”

Yet Gopstein’s supporters believe the state has treated him too harshly, protecting free speech for Arabs and not for Jews. “What they’re accusing Bentzi of, you can say the same about the Arabs,” says Ben Gvir, Gopstein’s attorney. “Thousands of Arabs praise Palestinian terrorists, and no one is indicting them.”

Human rights groups call that argument absurd. Israel has imprisoned 470 Palestinians for social media incitement since 2015. Among them: the Arab-Israeli poet Dareen Tatour, who was arrested in October 2015, jailed for three months and remains under house arrest for publishing a poem and two Facebook status updates, which her attorneys claim Israeli authorities translated improperly. Tatour was indicted for incitement to violence and support of a terrorist organization.

Some, such as Shwartz-Altshuler, say this disparity is not caused by racism or bias but by outcomes: Because Arabs commit more terrorist attacks against Jews than the other way around, they’re more likely to be convicted of incitement. “The fear is that those incitements on Facebook in Arabic will make someone who sees them take a knife and go stab someone,” says the law professor. “On the other hand, Israeli authorities are well aware of the dangers that movements like Lehava pose to Israeli society”—and yet perhaps less concerned they’ll lead to deadly violence.

But are they doing enough to contain that danger? Jewish extremists have committed some of the most horrific crimes in Israeli history—from Goldstein’s massacre to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who championed peace with the Palestinians. His assassination—by Yigal Amir, a Jewish radical—came after months of right-wing Jewish incitement against Rabin and his peace efforts. It remains the only assassination of an Israeli head of state in the country’s history.

This poster is indicative of the racism in Israeli elections - a government party promises to campaign against inter-racial sex and relationships

“The fact that Kach was considered a terror organization means that any group stemming from it is essentially also a terrorist group,” argues Fady Khoury, an attorney at Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

Unlike the U.S., Israel has no constitution—and so no fundamental right to free speech. Instead, Israeli courts protect this freedom on a case-by-case basis. “The courts are very careful when it comes to pressing criminal charges against people over speech,” says Shwartz-Altshuler. And when it comes to people like Gopstein, the professor claims, “the Supreme Court is more afraid of government censorship than of what Lehava is saying to Israeli society.”

Ultimately, Israel may not have the power to stop Gopstein, since he is not a politician and has not committed any known attacks. “Kahane was not banned from speaking outside the Knesset,” notes Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a former member of Kahane’s Jewish Defense League in New York. “A democracy, especially a democracy under siege from constant war and terror, needs to walk a fine line between allowing freedom of speech and ensuring that freedom of speech doesn’t result in violence. Lehava needs to be reined in when it crosses the line. And it has repeatedly crossed the line. At the same time, Lehava’s ideas cannot be banned.”

Hard-Right Turn

In recent years, there have been political efforts to derail Gopstein, but they have largely failed. In 2015, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon tried to designate Lehava as a terrorist group. A year later, he was forced out of the government and replaced by Avigdor Lieberman, a hawkish figure who once said that disloyal Arab citizens of Israel should be beheaded. “Extremist and dangerous forces, Ya’alon warned as he resigned, “have taken over Israel.”

Since Kahane’s days, Israel has moved far to the right. Today, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 48 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that Israel should expel its Arab citizens, who constitute nearly 20 percent of its population. Twenty years ago, 32 percent of Israelis considered themselves left-wing. Today, that figure is 19 percent, according to the IDI, the Jerusalem-based think tank. A November report by IDI found that 51.5 percent of Jewish Israelis feel that to preserve Israel's Jewish identity, Arabs and Jews should live separately, and 58 percent say that people who aren’t willing to say Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people should have their citizenship revoked. Today, the government is even considering legislation that some observers say would make Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority state more important than its democratic values. This would be the first step, some observers claim, toward establishing the country Kahane envisioned.

Part of this hard-right shift, analysts say, has to do with the trauma of the violent second intifada, or uprising. Between 2000 and 2005, Israelis lived through a long series of almost daily suicide bombings in cities such as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It also reflects a loss of faith in the peace process. After Israel and the Palestinians signed the historic Oslo Accords in 1993, many had hoped the bloody, decades-long conflict would end. Instead, both sides are locked in a stalemate, and Israel has fought two wars with Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza.

Arab-Israeli Muslim groom, Mahmoud Mansour, and his Israeli bride Morel Malcha sit in Mansour's family home in Tel Aviv on August 17, 2014, ahead of their wedding ceremony. Their union was met with extreme protests from Lehava, which militates against the "Jewish assimilation and intermarriage." Daniel Bar-On/AFP/Getty

Gopstein says he’s merely expressing what most Israelis believe, which he insists isn’t racist. "Arabs who accept this state as a Jewish state can stay here. Those who don’t need to leave,” he tells me. “We don’t want to kill Arabs just because they’re Arabs. That’s racism. But Arabs who want to take our country from us? God gave Israel to the Jewish people, and people who don’t believe that shouldn’t be here. ”

A resident of Kiryat Arba, the radical Jewish settlement inside the mostly Palestinian city of Hebron, Gopstein rejects the claim that he encourages or even inspires his followers to commit violence. “I’m against doing illegal things,” he insists. “The solution is not to burn the Arab-Jewish schools; the solution is to close them.” And yet he doesn’t condemn those illegal acts and even defends Goldstein’s Hebron massacre. “I don’t think that what Goldstein did was bad. I just wouldn’t do it myself. He saw Arabs killing his friends and family, and he saw them being happy about their deaths. So he took revenge.”

Gopstein claims to have no interest in following Kahane’s footsteps into politics. Yet his influence is felt, even without him serving in the Israeli parliament. Members of the country’s ruling party have invited him multiple times to speak in the Knesset. The Jerusalem municipality allowed Lehava to post billboards in November, advertising the Kahane memorial and thanking Gopstein for his work. In 2015, the Education Ministry banned an award-winning novel about an Arab-Jewish romance from the national high school curriculum, after Gopstein launched a campaign against it.

Like Kahane, Gopstein’s ultimate dream is an Israel that operates according to Jewish law, or Halacha, where the only Arabs who live there are those loyal to a Jewish theocracy. “At this rate,” he says of Palestinian citizens of Israel, “it’s either us or them.”

This story has updated the titles of Tehilla Shwartz-Altshuler and Fady Khoury​

MKS TOLD MORE EDUCATION IS NEEDED TO COMBAT INTERMARRIAGE

Likud MK Hotovely hosts hearing on marriages between Jewish women, Arab men in honor of Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset

By Rebecca Anna Stoil

Jerusalem Post, February 11, 2011 01:31

Tzipi Hotovely 311. (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)

Marriages between Jewish women and Arab men took center stage at a meeting of the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women this week, when committee chairwoman Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) hosted a hearing on the subject in honor of Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset.

“We must confront the fact that the country has not valued education, which is the only way to prevent Jewish women from forging life connections with non-Jews,” Hotovely said.

“The struggle against assimilation only reaches headlines through stories about Jewish women marrying Muslim men, but it is important to remember that the phenomenon is much wider – 92,000 mixed families live in the State of Israel. There is a need to create a curriculum for girls in high schools that deals with Jewish identity. The fact that girls reach a state of intermarriage testifies to the fact that the education system was absent.”

Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset on Tuesday was sponsored by the Tzohar organization and by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi), and featured a number of committee meetings, all focusing on aspects of Jewish identity in Israel. But not all the lawmakers thought that the subject was appropriate material for a committee hearing.

“There cannot be a hearing that seeks to determine with whom it is permissible to be married. It is a personal issue – there are things that the state should not be involved with,” complained MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List-Ta’al). “This hearing gives legitimacy to an anti-democratic and very dangerous situation in which the Knesset is expected to back up Halacha – the concept of Jewish identity does not need to make racism kosher.”

Sanaa elicited a chuckle from fellow MKs when he cited the Bible as proof of his argument.

“Ruth the Moabite wasn’t Jewish, but her descendant was King David,” he said. “I’d like to see what would happen if in France they held a hearing about what happens when Christians marry Jews.”

Yad L’Achim’s Zehava Drori said her organization took care of women who “are affiliated with all kinds of minorities.
“The scale of the problem is very wide – we feel that there is a constant silencing of the phenomenon,” she said.

Yad L’Achim representatives said there was a growing phenomenon of “girls who are converted to Islam without even being aware of the significance of what is happening to them. The sheikh comes to their house, and converts them.”

Under Israeli law, mixed-religion couples cannot be married in Israel, and thus the women are converted to Islam. But the women, said organization representatives, do not understand that their children, though Jews according to Halacha, will be registered as Muslim.

Yad L’Achim says it is currently working with approximately 1,000 women, while in 2008, it only had about 500. Most of the women, it says, came from backgrounds of severe economic or emotional distress.

“It is not racist to oppose intermarriage – marriages between Jewish women and Muslim men are like water and oil,” said Sarit, a Jewish woman who had been married to an Arab man. “It is not racist because they are not bad, but there are differences in mentalities that are impossible to deny.”

Ben-Zion Gopstein of the Lehava organization said that “there are a number of organizations that work with these girls after they ask for help, but we need to reach them before they get to the [Arab] villages.

“This is Lehava’s goal. We go to schools and to entertainment areas and explain to girls what it means to be a Jewish woman. There are those who date and marry Arabs – including those from religious schools, and haredi girls.”

Gopstein said that in one religious girls’ school he had visited in Bat Yam, 20 percent of the girls at the age of 14 were dating Arabs. “The problem is the legitimacy that is given today to intermarriage,” he said.

“The Jewish Agency invests millions in the war against assimilation overseas, but here in Israel, every girl wants to be Bar Refaeli,” he continued, referring to the Israeli supermodel who is dating non-Jewish film star Leonardo DiCaprio.

Gopstein noted that “in this very Knesset, there is an MK who is married to a German man,” a reference to Labor MK Einat Wilf. But, he complained, “it is not politically correct to speak out about it. We don’t discuss this as being unacceptable.”

Israeli Soldier and National Hero Elor Azaria Goes on Trial For Executing Palestinian Lying Prostrate

I have already posted about Elor Azaria, the soldier who was named by Israel’s most popular free paper, Israel Hayom, as Israeli of the year. THIS IS Israel – Call to Kill All Arabs at Tel Aviv Rally in Support for Killer Soldier

 What did Elor do to earn this accolade?  In most countries it might be rescuing a group of people in danger of their life.  Going into a fire and rescuing a child or some such act of bravery.  Not in Israel.

Elor’s accolade was earned by murdering Abdel Fattah al-Sharifa, who was only a Palestinian, who had already been badly wounded in the settlers’ terrorist enclave in Hebron.  Abdel Fattah al-Sharif was already lying face down in the street as a Magen David ambulance tended to a soldier lightly wounded.  Thus Israel’s ambulance service ignored the first and basic rule of triage, to ascertain who is in most need of medical attention first.   This is practiced in all British hospital A&E’s as a queueing system might lead to someone badly injured or hurt dying.

Not in Israel though.  Arabs do not fit into a triage system where the priority is on the Jewish race.  In the occupied territories this is doubly so.  An Arab wounded by the security forces, is automatically deemed a ‘terrorist’ and receives attention last, if at all.

Our Elor, who is a supporter of the late neo-Nazi Rabbi Meir Kahane, was seriously disturbed by the wounded Palestinian.  Why is he allowed to live he was saying and he took a rifle and nonchalantly shot him in the head.   Normally this would go unpunished by the army.  Indeed it is in the rules on dealing with ‘terrorists’ (people who resist the occupation in normal language).  It is called ‘confirming the kill’. 

The only problem was that some annoying Palestinian, who was later threatened and severely harassed, had captured the scene on a camera kindly supplied by the Israeli civil rights group, Btselem, which is itself under attack for ‘supporting terrorism’.

The army therefore had to arrest Elor and the Minister of Defence, Moshe Yalon supported this.   So did Netanyahu until his far-right Minister of Education, Naftali Bennet started kicking up and condemning the attacks on Elor.  Soon a full scale public campaign was under way to make Elor a national hero.  A large demonstration was held in Tel Aviv under the banner ‘Kill them all’ (i.e. all the Arabs) and a lovely poster ‘My honour is my loyalty’ made up the occasion.  Probably the idiot who carried it was unaware that this was the slogan of the Nazi SS!

Now our Elor is coming up for trial.  My bet is that he won’t see gaol time and if, a big if, he is convicted of manslaughter he will soon have that downgraded to some minor offence.  Either way Elor will be free very soon at the very worst.

The article below seems to consist of a great deal of wishful thinking.

Tony Greenstein

Azaria’s conviction will end a totalitarian ideology

Sgt. Elor Azaria, surrounded by army friends 

This is one in a series of columns by Yakov Hirsch on Hasbara Culture, and its impact on discourse and politics in Israel and the U.S. You can see the other columns here.

In the beginning of January 2017, Israeli sergeant Elor Azaria is going to be found guilty for the execution of Abd al Fatah Al-Sharif lying prostate on the ground in Hebron last March 24. And the Israeli political reaction to that verdict will be transformative. It is then that the hasbara culture cultivated by Benjamin Netanyahu will at last be confronted by a sane Israel led by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The discourse that will resound in Israel in defense of Azaria will be incoherent to anyone who is not an adherent of the hasbara culture that now permeates that society. Naftali Bennett, the education minister under Netanyahu, has already been saying that Azaria needs to be pardoned if convicted.

We have already heard from soldiers who say they will go “AWOL” or even desert should their fellow combatant be convicted of manslaughter charges by the military court.

Jeffrey Goldberg epitomizes Hasbara Culture (Photo: Riccardo S. Savi/Getty Images)

The saga of the Murdering Medic is so important because it has revealed the way that “hasbara” – or the Israeli tradition of spinning its actions to try and make them acceptable to the world – has so deeply affected the spinners themselves that hasbara has hardened into an Israeli construction of reality, so much so that the many participants in that reality no longer think it is necessary to even spin bad events.

Observers who think the Israel of 2016 is an Israel of Netanyahu “cowering before the settlers” are wrong in my opinion.

The real struggle in Israeli leadership is who can control a sacred ethnocentric discourse of Jewish persecution and innocence. That is what has shaped Israeli politics in recent years: the heavyweight battle between Netanyahu and Bennett over control of the reins of hasbara culture.

Let us recall the Israeli government reaction to the video of the killing when it came out last March. Here, after all, was irrefutable evidence of the IDF behaving as its worst critics around the world claim that it does. The whole scene in its hideous naked glory — with the indifferent Israeli soldier “bystanders” to the shooting, as well as the congratulatory hand shake for Azaria from his friend the settler leader Baruch Marzel at the end (as Larry Derfner revealed)—was a nightmare for the difficult business of hasbara.

The video gave the lie to the carefully cultivated image of the world’s most moral army.

We all braced ourselves for the Israeli effort to spin the video: if only to argue that it was an aberration from the IDF norms.

But that is not what happened. What happened is that high officials in the government said, we saw exactly what you saw in that video, and it is fine.

Let’s go back to the timeline. A couple of days after the killing, Amos Harel in Haaretz described it as a “coldblooded execution” and an inevitable one, but he anticipated official condemnation.

Scene of the murder

“The chief of staff, who was once a brigade and division commander of soldiers in the territories, knows [that]… Animal-like behavior like that seen in Thursday’s incident in Hebron can quickly become the unwritten procedure for units in the field. That is the reason that the shooter was immediately arrested, an unusual move for the IDF these days, and the reason for the sharp public condemnations issued by [chief of staff Gadi] Eisenkot and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon…”

“Meanwhile, we’ve seen no right-wing campaign in support of the shooter.”

Even Netanyahu was on board at this point. He said

“that the soldier’s conduct does not represent the army’s values and even insinuated that the soldier failed to act in accordance with the military’s open-fire rules.”

This story might very well have ended there were it not for hasbara culture. Azaria would have been a bad apple. Even the most moral army in the world has a bad apple or two!

But then Education Minister Bennett came into the picture. Three days after the killing, he began lecturing Netanyahu in the very way Netanyahu lectures human rights groups.

“This soldier was sent by the State of Israel to defend against terror during war,” he said before entering the [Cabinet] meeting. “That some of this country’s leadership has jumped to conclusions before the trial is a mistake and are dancing to the tune of B’Tselem…”

Once the Azaria incident got defined as a story of “us” vs our “enemies,” Netanyahu had nowhere to go except to agitate with Bennett. Because it is Netanyahu himself who has cultivated the world view that the Palestinian on the ground should be killed.

Netanyahu can’t be on the B’Tselem side of this fight!

It should be stressed what the environment is in Israel since the so called “knife intifada” started.

Naftali Bennett states that “terrorists must be killed, not freed”; Yair Lapid clarifies, “You have to shoot to kill anyone who pulls out a knife or a screwdriver”; Bezalel Smotrich cries, “A terrorist who sets out to murder Jews, whatever his age, must not return alive”; and Gilad Erdan declares, “Every terrorist must know he won’t survive the attack he is about to commit.”

Bennett best summed up the government line on Azaria:

“Talk of a murder charge against a combat soldier during a combat operation is a moral mistake that blurs the lines between good and evil. I expect this mistake to be mended.”

Netanyahu then reversed himself. He called the parents of the accused medic, and described Azaria as “one of our children.” He later compared his empathetic call to calling a parent of an IDF soldier fallen in combat.

In Netanyahu’s Israel, hasbara culture is the only game in town. You’re either on the side of hasbara culture and all that’s good in the world, or you’re on the side of the devil. Remember what hasbara culture ideas Netanyahu most champions. From his speech at the teens’ funeral in 2014:

“A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion.”

That statement and Bennett’s statement of “a moral mistake” in blaming Azaria is why I insist that we are dealing with hasbara culture.

Hasbara began as the need to make sense to outsiders, to spin reality. But these leaders are no longer concerned with that project: they will not convince unindoctrinated outsiders that Azaria doesn’t belong in prison with this type of talk. Any ordinary person seeing that video realizes that Elor Azaria does not represent “good” and his going to prison is not a “moral mistake.”

But for the indoctrinated these statements fall on fertile soil. Bennett is reflecting the Israeli experience of reality when he says that the idea of charging Azaria “blurs the lines between good and evil.” We are good, they are evil. Bennett is saying that the scene of the Azaria shooting of Abd al Fatah Al-Shari is “sacred.” It’s part of the us vs them, good vs bad, narrative that is at the heart of hasbara culture. Hasbara culture understands Jewish history as one long morality tale. It is the foundation of an extreme Jewish ethnocentric narrative, which in its telling, started over two millennia ago and runs through all of hasbara culture’s tendentious telling of Jewish history up to today.

We are going to be hearing a lot more of this kind of talk after the inevitable guilty verdict for Azaria in early January.

But we will also be hearing pushback from Israelis who understand how the rest of the world sees reality.

To understand the other side of this ideological battle, you must recall Gen. Yair Golan’s Holocaust memorial speech of last May, when, alarmed by the rising chorus of voices that excused Azaria’s conduct as the appropriate way to treat Palestinians, he warned that Nazi currents are alive in Israeli political culture today. The speech resulted in the sacking of Golan’s former boss, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who had defended the speech to Netanyahu.

This duality is also what the whole circus surrounding the Amona settlement is about. Once Bennett agitates and defines the struggle on behalf of the Amona settlers as being the same as the sacred struggle in Jewish and Zionist history, Netanyahu becomes Bennett’s hostage.

Ideological moderation is no longer an option at this late date of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career. His Manichean scorched earth holy wars against his “leftist” political and cultural enemies is Netanyahu’s signature use of toxic hasbara culture for his personal gain; for electoral success.

And Netanyahu’s big political problem these days is Bennett wanting to become the new overseer of hasbara culture. Netanyahu can never let that happen – or he is done.

This is not just about securing the support of the pro-settlement voters. It’s about securing the support of the entire political culture of Israeli society.

And Naftali Bennett is no ordinary right-wing politician. He has constantly been trying to wrest control of hasbara culture from Benjamin Netanyahu.  He knows that it is the key to Netanyahu’s success.

This also explains the state of the left in Israel today. The left in hasbara culture is on the side of “them” and the “bad” of Jewish history.

As a recent poll has shown, nearly half of Israelis think the left are “traitors.”

In short, there is no place for the “left” in the totalitarian ideology of hasbara culture.

Jeffrey Goldberg by Steve Voss, Bloomberg

It is one thing for Netanyahu and Bennett to drag Israeli politics into the narrow and confined space of hasbara culture. The state of Israel must work these things out for itself.

But as an American and a Jew, my concern is the fact that hasbara culture also dominates our discussions of the conflict.

That is the achievement of Jeffrey Goldberg and his followers, who are ready to use the Holocaust and anti-Semitism and other smears against any mainstream voice that is out of line.

Goldberg has said that Jill Stein is crazy for supporting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. For the same alleged crime, going to a BDS rally, he has accused a Norwegian rock band of being Nazis.

What Netanyahu has done with hasbara culture in Israel Jeffrey Goldberg has done with it here: created a sacred discourse that no one in the mainstream can contradict. In fact, ever since Andrew Sullivan left the scene, no one has confronted hasbara culture directly here.

And therefore, the Elor Azaria case is a crisis for Goldberg, too. The video of the murdering medic set off a chain of events in Israel in which hasbara culture is NOW facing a serious confrontation. Leading figures have become dissidents, accusing Netanyahu and Bennett and others of fostering fascistic strains in Israeli society. This drama is only going to accelerate when as I believe, Azaria is convicted in January.

Goldberg has had almost nothing to say about Azaria. The reason is obvious. Azaria executing someone because the hasbara culture voice in his head told him to may not be a problem for Naftali Bennett and Israeli leaders, but it is a big Stop sign here. Azaria exposes Goldberg’s achievement: Because in the sacred and tribal socially-constructed reality Goldberg has created, all Palestinian resistance is motivated by hatred for Jews. That is why they attempt to stab soldiers.

But the video of the medic calmly killing an incapacitated Palestinian on the ground exposes what is really going on there. Haaretz’s Gideon Levy described the Israeli policy in the territories:

a policy – to kill, kill and kill. No taking prisoners, no arrest procedures, no rules of engagement. Every knife or scissors wielder, every stone or firebomb thrower and every car rammer – or anyone who is seen to resemble one – must die.

Jeffrey Goldberg has attacked Haaretz as a dissident publication, but his career ambitions do not allow him to say what he really thinks about the “plight” of the Israeli soldier while the world is looking at the Azaria video. Because what Elor Azaria thinks about Palestinian resistance is what Jeffrey Goldberg thinks about Palestinian resistance: It’s all about the Jews. Jeffrey Goldberg’s whole career has been one long tendentious effort to define opposition to Israel as opposition to Jews, as being motivated by a hatred of Jews. And that “social construction of reality” about Abd al Fatah Al-Sharif, which Elor Azaria experienced when he said “the terrorist must die” is what Jeffrey Goldberg has been preaching to the Jewish community and everyone else for the past twenty years.

But when even Israeli leaders have said that the case exposes fascism and Nazi currents in Israel, it is too dangerous for an ambitious “liberal” like Goldberg to say a word in Azaria’s favor.

It is not a surprise that the only thing Jeffrey Goldberg had to say about the case was to retweet a Shmuel Rosner article, whose only coherent message is that the Azaria trial is a PR disaster for Israel. Rosner repeated former defense minister Moshe Arens’s warning about the case:

“Elor Azaria’s Trial Should Never Have Become a Public Affair”

That is precisely Goldberg’s feeling. The case should never have become a public matter because it has only exposed the fact that Hasbara Culture is now run amok in Israel. And when Azaria is convicted, all hell will break loose. A broad segment of society will be outraged; a few sane Israelis will plead for the rule of law. Netanyahu will defend the medic. And Barak will try to unify an anti-Netanyahu coalition.

Goldberg must have felt like the luckiest person in the world when he got promoted to being editor in chief of The Atlantic two months ago. Who could expect the new editor with his huge workload to share his opinion about what was going on in Israel!

I have done my best to show how the Elor Azaria story and its reverberations in Israel have been spun by the hasbarists here. The people who have made a career out of obfuscation and obscurantism about all things Israel (from Max Boot to Bret Stephens to Eli Lake) continued to do so in our discourse. We will return after the Azaria verdict to assess how these “journalists” who claim to be the biggest experts America and the Jewish community have to offer on Israel did on their real life quiz about what the Azaria story was really about.

Meanwhile we can only cross our fingers and hope that Jeffrey Goldberg– “no greater journalist writing in the country today,” and our biggest expert on Israel– will take a break from his busy schedule and share his wisdom with the rest of us. What has Elor Azaria wrought?